Empower NJ = No Jobs for Blue-collar Working People

Here is the  message from groups like Posh People over Pipeline workers, the Bergen Green Faith Circle, Food & Water Watch, the Wood Stove Heating and Cooking Coalition, Roseland Against the Compressor Station (put it somewhere else!), Don’t Heat the Meadowlands Coalition, Blue Wave, the Dunghill Alliance, People of Faith/Without Faith, Citizen Action, Watersports, and

Climate Mama…

Hey Operating Engineers… screw you!

Hey Laborers… screw you! 

Hey Steam Fitters… screw you!

Hey Pipe-Fitters… screw you!

And the list goes on and on.  Any trade union worker who has anything to do laying underground pipe or the plants and facilities it serves has just been flipped the bird by the One Percenters and their mouthpieces in the so-called environmental movement.

When you understand where they live and what they do for a living, you will get the joke about some of these so-called environmentalists.  “Trust fund” isn’t a job description.  Neither is “spouse of a banker” or “of a Wall Streeter” or “of a corporate lawyer”.  You don’t break a sweat running a non-profit.  Living in bubble land and having a lot of free time on your hands doesn’t qualify you to be an expert on the economic fallout of your thoughts and whimseys. 

A former Governor of Colorado – a Democrat – had it right when he called bullshit on the direction that the environmental movement was heading when it refused to recognize that more people equaled less green areas, less farms, less forests and fields – and more of the crap heros like Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold started the movement to oppose.  If the founders of the environmental movement came back today and saw what was being done in their name – trees chopped down and fields turned into solar panel farms – they’d never stop throwing up.

Every group involved in the Empower NJ – Stop Fossil Fuels Campaign is in favor of shoehorning more and more people into New Jersey – the most densely populated state in America.  That’s right, New Jersey has 1,210 people per square mile; followed by Rhode Island with 1,022 people per square mile; then Massachusetts with 871 people per square mile; and Connecticut with 742 people per square mile. 

And guess what??? Governor Phil Murphy just put out a “come and get some” sign to the entire world with his Sanctuary State program, special status for criminals, free legal counsel, free health care, education, subsidized college, and a plethora of other free and subsidized stuff.  Just wait until they need to unsave that farmland to make way for more subsidized housing… hey, you can’t ask people to come here illegally and then leave them in the streets.  When you invite people in you have the duty, as a good host, to make sure they are comfortable.

Every group involved with Empower NJ is happy to clear-cut every last scrap of green space in the state in order to conform to fashionable opinions regarding illegal immigration, but when it comes to working people of all colors, genders, and ethnicities – they are as one – and with a unified voice Empower NJ says “screw them”!  That’s because the people who run Empower NJ have nothing to do with the woods.  They live in fey, gentrified urban enclaves playing on their phones, sucking down lattes, and complaining that real woodland folk are “trailer trash” who just don’t get it. 

Yep, working people just don’t understand that they are supposed to sacrifice their means to life and their families to the fashion statements of the One Percent and the pet causes they fund.  But you know how fashion is when it comes to people as powerful as the One Percent are… today’s fashions are tomorrow’s laws.

Republican Assemblywomen join labor unions in standing up to Murphy

Better get used to it, Governor Murphy!

At this week's Assembly Health Committee hearing two Republican Assemblywomen took on Governor Murphy's plans to pour taxpayers' money back into crony capitalist groups like Planned Parenthood.  Yeah, yeah, we know that for the uneducated few, Planned Parenthood is synonymous with "women's health."  But it's not.  It is only one of many providers all jostling for market share.

No, you say?  It's a non-profit organization?  Sure, and so was the NFL.  And so are a lot of organizations that make billions and pay their executives millions.  Setting up as a "not-for-profit corporation" is simply a business model -- it's not an "I'm not greedy" pass.

And Planned Parenthood is greedy.  It wants total market share.  That's why it organized the way does -- to spend millions on lobbyists and even more on grassroots marketing -- to convince American women that only they provide the services that, in fact, hundreds of other organizations provide.  We're sure Macy's would like to have the same deal.

Planned Parenthood uses well-paid lobbyists and political pressure to secure government money with as little questions asked as possible.  They want to keep all the vittles for themselves and starve their competition.  Planned Parenthood wants to have a monopoly -- and we all know what that does to consumers and taxpayers.  Consumers pay more and have less choice.  Taxpayers get ripped-off.

Well not when Assemblywomen Holly Schepisi and Nancy Munoz are around!

Holly Schepisi is like a Bergen Bulldog when ripping into a bureaucrat.  The Assemblywoman asked for Planned Parenthood's financial details -- its annual budget, annual revenue and executive compensation, none of which the group's political director could provide during the hearing. 

We can only suppose that Murphy told the director to drop by and pick-up a blank check.  But Schepisi wasn't having it.

"If it was that important, how could the head not be able to explain any of these items?"  Schepisi asked the Health Committee's Democrat Chairman.  "If it wasn’t just a political football, if it was that important to women’s health, how do we not have these answers?"

Schepisi told the group:  "We have a lot of phenomenal organizations in this state that approach us for funding. The amount of money that you guys want is more than every school that I represent gets for school funding every year."

Assemblywoman Munoz advocated using the funding for organizations that aren’t supported by billions of dollars like Planned Parenthood, such as federally qualified health centers and other clinics.

“Why don’t we give this money to the New Jersey Coalition for Sexual Assault?” she asked.

Munoz noted that there are 279 walk-in clinics, 37 retail clinics, 187 urgent care clinics and 9 pediatric urgent care centers throughout the state that perform women’s health services without public funding.  Why should they be left high and dry with all the funding going to Planned Parenthood?

The efforts by the Republican Assemblywoman to keep the process honest was matched by the efforts of some labor union leaders to question why a former Lehman Brothers executive was going to get a no-questions-asked Murphy appointment to head the state's Economic Development Authority.  

Led by the redoubtable Bill Mullen, of the New Jersey State Building & Construction Trades Council, many blue-collar unions questioned the priorities of Murphy-pick Tim Sullivan, late of Lehman Brothers and currently the deputy commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Economic & Community Development.

Like the Wall Streeter he is, Sullivan has steered a decidedly anti-blue collar course in Connecticut, giving priority to more fashionable projects in what he called the "six key business sectors" he wants to focus on: "insurance and financial services; digital media; green technology; advanced manufacturing; bioscience; and tourism. "

A state like New Jersey, with a new Governor who is committed to bringing in tens of thousands of sanctuary seekers -- many of whom lack language and job skills, should be looking to invest in projects that more broadly employ blue-collar workers and those who, through blue-collar apprenticeship, can learn the skills they need to get onto the employment ladder.

Stay tuned...

Murphy calls Trump names again. Stupid or dishonest?

Did Phil Murphy sleep through the history briefing he received when President Obama appointed him Ambassador to Germany?  He must have.  And it really is too bad.

If he had stayed awake, Murphy would know that the German Republic (1919-1933) was brought down by violence from both the Right and the Left.  He would understand that both violent extremes hated the centrist Republic, hated democracy, hated the police, and that they often joined together in battle against the Social Democrats and other centrists.  Many former leftist thugs were quite happy to join the thugs in the S.A. or Sturmabteilung -- a far-right, paramilitary group run by an LGBTQ Nazi named Ernst Rohm.

It is the rise of political violence that should trouble our political class -- not the ideas used as an excuse for it.  We can out-debate the foolish proponents of Nazism, Anarchy, and Communism.  Self-government, democracy, the rights and freedoms afforded under a Republic should be easy propositions to argue and win.  Especially when all your opponents have are the Cloud Cuckoo land theories of racial exceptionalism held by neo-Nazis, the juvenile rantings of post-teen anarchists, and the authoritarianism promised by Communists.  Catch these asswipes arguing with each other and fighting:

It's pitiful. 

And it is only going to get worse due to the irresponsible comments by one-percenters-on-the-make like Wall Streeter Phil Murphy.  Murphy, the Democrat candidate for Governor, fundraised himself into an Ambassadorship in the Obama administration.  Now he tries to serve up warmed over history lessons of the most absurd kind.

Yesterday, the Observer NJ website reported on Murphy's latest attempt to push the line that President Donald Trump is the same as Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler:

"In provocative comments, Phil Murphy, the Democratic nominee for governor, went so far as to compare the political climate fostered by President Trump to the rise of Nazi Germany. Murphy said the racial violence hit home as a former U.S. ambassador to Germany, and said people should be worried about the Trump administration.

...But Murphy by far has been one of the most sharply critical Democrats of the president in the wake of the deadly violence this weekend at a white supremacist demonstration. Murphy over the weekend also suggested Trump was inciting people to commit violence, and it’s not the first time he makes the Nazi comparison."

First, having participated in wrecking the American economy in the run-up to 2008, Wall Streeter Phil Murphy bears a great deal of the responsibility for fostering the political climate that gave us Donald Trump.  Nothing like a great recession, record poverty, child-hunger, foreclosure, homelessness, joblessness and under-employment, and suicide to tip a society off the deep-end.  And when Americans of all races, creeds, colors, and genders needed jobs, Phil Murphy was creating them... offshore.  Good job, Bozo.

If Phil Murphy had even a tiny fraction of common sense to go with all that misbegotten dough he has tucked away in various financial institutions, he would pick up on the fact that by saying that an American President is Hitler, Murphy is himself "inciting people to commit violence" -- up to an including armed insurrection.  Think about it, Dimwit!  If people are really, really convinced that this guy is really, really Hitler... then who wouldn't use every means to overthrow the elected government of the United States of America?  And is that really what you are pushing for?  You sure about this?  You know, there's stupid, and then there's this.  So keep flapping your gums, rich guy with shit-for-brains.

And this isn't the first time you went there:

The national media reported on your earlier gum-flapping incident:

"A former Goldman Sachs executive who appeared to compare the Trump administration to the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany during the 1920s won New Jersey's gubernatorial primary.

The Associated Press declared Phil Murphy (D-Monmouth), the winner of Tuesday's crowded primary race.

Murphy served as ambassador to Germany under President Barack Obama.

At a speech earlier this year in Montclair, near Paterson, Murphy said he 'lived in Germany twice.'

'I kn[e]w what was being said about somebody else in the 1920s,' he added.

Murphy said that people could 'drop in names from today into those observations from the 1920s.'

Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) and Murphy's opponent, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno (R-N.J.) - the Republican primary victor - called for Murphy to apologize for what some saw as a comparison between Trump and Hitler.

Recently, on a New Jersey news program, Murphy appeared to double down on his remarks."

Yeah, Trump is like Hitler. . . except for his Jewish daughter and son-in-law and grand kids.  Yeah... except that unlike you and Trump, Hitler wasn't a rich guy.  Hitler was a street bum picked up by the German Army and placed into the National Socialist Party (NSDAP).   Oh yeah, Trump didn't try to overthrow the government by violent force (like you are trying to do, Phil Murphy).  Guess you were asleep for the part of your briefing that covered the 1923 Putsch.  And America didn't just lose a World War like Germany did.  And America isn't a brand new republic, like Germany was, we go back a little ways.  And -- despite the best efforts of people like you, Phil Murphy, you Wall Streeters didn't quite wreck the American economy as badly as Germany's was wrecked in the 1920's.  We haven't had hyper-inflation yet, neither have we had a Great Depression recently...  Oh, but you did try, didn't you?

So other than that (and a lot, lot more) your comparison, Phil Murphy, is spot on.

Idiot.